Social Platforms

The above images shows one of the healthy instagram profiles we developed for a client from inception. Now with over 6,000 organically-grown followers, the social media ROI for this client is tangible.

Here’s a couple of questions a journalist at News Limited recently posed to our director Stewart Dawes for one of their articles:

What’s hot – Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest ….?

Currently I’ve been making the somewhat brattish pronouncement that ‘Twitter is dead’. Of course it’s not dead and it still has millions of enthusiasts. However there has been a massive ‘migration of focus’ to Instagram. People are taking the opportunity to post their instagram images directly to Twitter, but they’re actually staying on Instagram and enjoying the photos and community of others and logging far more infrequently into Twitter – some are not going there at all, they’re just using Twitter as a dumping ground for their Instagram images. I’ve noticed two things: the Twitter responses are less now even though I have 10,000-plus organically-grown Twitter followers than when I had just 1,000 followers. And when I post a photo on Instagram, it will get 100-plus likes from just 1200 or so followers – so that’s proven visibility – whereas most of the time it will now get zero response from 10,000 twitterati. When Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion my thoughts were that they’d be partying at Pinterest as early last year their value could have potentially been even higher than Instagram. However while Instagram has got hotter, Pinterest is just luke-warm by comparison. Pinterest is great for scrap-booking other people’s images, but the public’s passion is for glorifying their own lives, convenienced by smartphone camera improvements and flattered by Instagram’s image-enhancing filters.

For those who think they’ve got a great idea and might be the next Mark Zuckerberg, how do you know you’ve jumped from boring to brilliant in cyberspace?

It’s rare for people to go from boring to brilliant in cyberspace though of course I often say to people, after I’ve listed scores of reservations, that nevertheless “anything can happen”. Imagine being Twitter and Instagram, attracting millions of users but having no revenue at all for a large part of their formative stages. Most bloggers or social media people put in thousands of hours to build up audience engagement but even then after a few years I still say to my clients let’s not forget we’re still scratching the surface of the surface even when reasonably successful. The allure of having a video, image or tweet go viral remains for many the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but something will pretty much never go viral if its initial audience is tiny. Most of the time the people who are seemingly overnight successes thanks to social media have in fact been plugging away at it quietly and professionally for years, honing their ideas and thinking strategically about it all along.

I’m very into building up grass-roots community critical mass based around following target-market individuals who are either in your field of interest or relevant due to location – it may seem primitive and is hugely time-consuming but there are tipping points where the followers and fans reach that mystical critical mass, a goldilocks zone where almost every action gets a valuable reaction. Yes a lot of hard work but of course anything can happen. I remember I was only on Twitter a month and had maybe 100 followers when I picked up a graphic design client from London who found me on Twitter – that blew my mind. And a friend who had been on Twitter for two weeks had a journalist contact her through that platform to feature her as a full-page article in one of Australia’s highest-circulation daily newspapers. So the hope and myths that buzz around social media are compelling. It’s definitely a medium where dreams can come true.